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In the wake of last week’s Megaupload shutdown, some of the biggest names in the market are taking drastic action. During the last 48 hours many sites have completely withdrawn their systems for paying uploaders when their files are shared with others, but one of the most dramatic moves came first from Filesonic and today Fileserve. Both services now forbid people from downloading any files they didn’t upload themselves.

While the shutdown last week of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team was certainly dramatic, a situation of perhaps even greater gravity is beginning to emerge.

Over the past 48 to 72 hours, the operators of many prominent cyberlocker services have been taking unprecedented actions that can not simply be explained away by mere coincidence. The details in the Megaupload indictment clearly have some players in the file-hosting world spooked.

One of the key
allegations
is that between 2005 and mid 2011, Megaupload ran a program that rewarded users for uploading infringing material. A cited internal email allegedly shows staff members discussing cash payments going to people uploading “full popular DVD rips” and “software with keygenerators (Warez)”.

Although Megaupload stopped paying out rewards in July 2011, that didn’t stop the site from getting raided. Other cyberlocker services are clearly hoping they will be more lucky.

Last evening
Filesonic, a top 10 player in the file-sharing world with a billion pageviews a month, not only withdrew its affiliate rewards program, but
also banned
any third parties downloading files. Simply put, users can now only download files from the service that they uploaded themselves.

But according to reports, there’s no guarantee of that. Account owners report that their files are being mass deleted, that’s if their entire account hasn’t been banned already.

Fileserve, another leading player, also ended its affiliate program this weekend. Additionally, this morning TorrentFreak received news that Fileserve has now joined Filesonic in banning all 3rd party downloads.

“I just paid for a premium account and can now only download my own fucking files an unlimited number of times,” said one angry user. “What use is that?”

Other users of Fileserve are experiencing an even further degraded level of service. Reports describe mass deletion of their uploads and the banning of accounts on apparent ‘Terms of Service’ violations.

But the changes at these two services appears to be just the tip of a very big and very complex iceberg. Developments at other file-hosting services are widespread.

As previously reported,
Uploaded.tobanned all US IP addresses
in what appears to be an effort to distance itself from US jurisdiction. Its affiliate program is still listed as operational but the same cannot be said about those run by some of its competitors.

VideoBB
and VideoZer
have both reportedly closed their rewards program and according to reports have also been mass deleting accounts and huge numbers of files.

Another interesting development involves so-called ‘release blogs’, sites that report on leaked material but either provide links to the material on cyberlockers or allow their users to do the same. The number of overall releases hasn’t changed much but the links currently being posted on some of these sites show less variety and volume than they did this time last week.

Do you know of other file-hosts/cyberlockers taking similar action? Send us your stories and screenshots to the
usual address.

Update:
Smaller host UploadBox
calls it quits. “All files will be deleted on January 30th. Feel free to download the files you store with UploadBox until this date.”

Anyone thought of the idea that the MAFIAA are in the background giving these sites exorbitant amounts of cash to shut down? And some see them shutting down, and Mega's situation, so they just follow suit?

I think Kim Dotcom knows they have nothing, and they just want to send a message. EVEN WITHOUT LAWS, WE WILL TAKE YOU FROM YOUR HOME, DESTROY YOUR BUSINESS AND THROW YOU IN JAIL. The big players "calling it quits" really makes the little guys scurry in worry of what might happen to them legally, but in reality "calling it quits" may just mean you don't need to do any business anymore because the MAFIAA just paid you off for life...

TO ANYONE THAT WANTS TO FILE A PAYPAL DISPUTE:If there has been more than 45 days since your Premium purchase at any of these services, then PayPal will IMMEDIATELY CLOSE the dispute and refuse to talk to you; doesn't matter if FileSonic killed your baby, they want NOTHING to do with you. They have a 45 day limit on disputes. Do not waste your time if you are over this.

What you should do if you are over 45 days:Look up the PayPal transaction and see if you paid via Credit Card, then look if you can file a chargeback. The time limit on this is significantly longer than PayPal but varies by card provider. You can expect about a 4-6 month time window for chargebacks.

In my case I'm shit outta luck for either of these but maybe I can help someone here. ;-/

They worry about jobs alright, just their own. They don't seem to care about putting half the cyberlocker business out of commission. Destroying peoples files, destroying peoples trust in cloud services, wasting the money people spend on accounts and whatever other consequences this has to the IT sector.

Hmmm... @ the same time this also seems to be an experiment as well underneath all of this mass hysteria on how these cyberlocker entities are reacting and users as well. You know, for the purpose of control.

and then thousands of Americans volunteer to clean up the mess with American made soaps...

Greed knows no country; no borders; no language. Don't tag "America" on it just because a multinational group of companies decided to go after other American companies and other non-American companies shat their pants and fled...>__>

@Urmomsuxgood
Hardly, you're just another retarded American who thinks his country is the only one that matters,Maybe if you hadn't spent your entire childhood believing the only thing you needed to learn was how to spell USA you might have a clue about the outside world.

Yeah we're just gonna march right up to Washington DC, smack congress & say "Stop that shit!"

Shut the fuck up you retarded windbag, America is a police state. We have NO say in what our government does. Even our voting system is rigged. Watch "Fahrenheit 9/11". You use America services every day. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, TORRENTFREAK, all come from America. Please rub those last two brain cells together before you pith forth such an idiotic slander.

I'm an American and I think this would be awesome. Sure there are many non-US sites that I use, and a lot of non-US sites are using US-based DNS services, but still this would send a strong message that the world doesn't need the US.

We just need to build a second god-damned internet already. I'm tired of capitalizing that "I" in internet anyways!

My problem is that most of the shows and movies I've downloaded from these filelockers aren't for sale, for one reason or another. You know, old episodes of shows that never made it to dvd or old movies that are out of print. It's not my fault that they made me a fan of something they never intended to sell me.

Have you been reading the news? Americans took a HUGE stand against SOPA and PIPA. We've been fighting this for about a year and a half. And we WON, those bills did not pass. But the MPAA (not a government agency) is pissed because they didn't get their way.

So how can Giganews, an Austin, TX located company still keep churning accounts?

God knows all the people who are getting accounts there are using them to download from alt.bin groups.

How come they aren't going after those services?

Who owns them?

Are they to obscure with legitimate text discussion uses?

If they survive then some big players are backing Giganews, and are taking down file hosts cause they are killing their business. Yes they may not be paying out users for uploading data in plain sight, but I'm sure it goes on under the table with scene release groups. Or here's a thought maybe it's actually the original content owner putting his content out there as another medium for advertisement.

How else do news providers such as Giganews make there money to have such wide backbone pipes?

I don't think you fully understand how ddos works. For you to bring down every online retailer of those products, you're gonna need (and this is an extremely rough estimate) approximately 250 giga-bits of bandwith at a bare minimum. Some ISPs don't have that kind of speed...

Why DDos? Just use your wallet and spend your money somewhere else, you remain on the good side of the law and it does not give them any excuse to pass the blame. Just remember all this money they spend on buying out politicians is money we have gave them at some point so if we want them to stop then we have to stop funding them.

Everyone should do something no matter how small, it will all add up. Cancel your netflix, do not buy dvd's, do not buy merchandise... money is the only language these people speak and the only way to hurt them.

They think it is ok to break the internet to increase their profits, so lets show them they made a big mistake.

Nice comment ass hat, cry me a river, can't steal anymore files from America....Boycott America...right. You can watch the bullshit that's produced in other places. I'm all for the the internet and freedom but when sites like these are there for one real reason and that's piracy they should be taken down. Maybe think of it this way. If any of you dumb fucks could actually invent something or come up with a novel idea yourself YOU would want to get paid for it and would raise hell if your shit was stolen over and over again.

When I were a lad, I used to follow the milk floats and collect the horse dung and sell it to the neighbours for their the roses. I can't say it was it was pleasant, but I made that job and earned a fair shilling.

All I am saying is, I don't know much but I know shit and I know those shovelling it. Now, the way I see it, as long as I still made my shilling, I wouldn't care who stole my shit. Get the point?

Tons of pirated content are uploaded to filelockers everyone knows that... Dont bitch at the USA for getting rid of megaupload. Copyright holders have a right to protect there property which I bet 90 percent of comes from the USA. If you hate the USA so much then stop using our products. You can start with your windows pc or mac because no one wants to hear you bitch!!

I'm an American and I'll gladly bitch at the USA. My country shames me every day. The corporations have too much power that they are taking over everything. They are privatizing the military, hospitals, prisons, you name it. These monstrous companies use this power to gobble up tons of intellectual property, control elections, and get lawmakers to pass extreme pro-copyright laws. Then they amass more power and when the Internet sharing occurs outside their jurisdiction they use their incredible power to extend beyond our borders and out to the world and begin overwriting the laws of other countries to suit their wants.

People worry about science and technology creating monsters. I submit that poorly regulated Capitalism produces monsters!

Nah if you think about it, the pirates are the **greedy** ones for wanting free shit without paying. It's like they're entitled to it without wanting to face the consequences.

These corporations are assholes the way they handle this issue, but hey, if you create something and charge for it but then thousands of people download it without paying a cent, wouldn't you be pissed, too?

They just want to protect their property. The users are the greedy ones.

Problem with that mind set is that you seem to fail to realize that the "property" they wish to protect was not created by them but by someone else. Sony, Paramount, Fox, CBS, ABC, Atlantic, BMG, etc.etc. are just middle men and that is who the MPAA is trying to protect. The artist themselves often are the ones who put the "property" up on sites so they can make money from every 1000 Downloads instead of waiting for a Fat Cat Executive hand them 10 cents on the dollar.

So this is all rally about the Artist and Writers and Performers and some people realizing that Executives are obsolete middle men and those middle men don't like that.

I don't want free shit. I'm perfectly willing to pay for something someone else made with heir time and effort (and I did - last year I had the chance and bought stuff I'd already downloaded, because those who made it deserved the money).

But I'm also in another country, and they WON't SELL that shit to me. And as someone else said up there, sometimes they won't sell their shit to ANYONE. So, I will pirate the local soap-opera that'll never get a DVD release because it's 200 episodes long, or the 90s TV show only available through iTunes - which won't sell to my country - until they give me the means to buy them.

I don't want free shit. I'm perfectly willing to pay for something someone else made with heir time and effort (and I did - last year I had the chance and bought stuff I'd already downloaded, because those who made it deserved the money).

But I'm also in another country, and they WON't SELL that shit to me. And as someone else said up there, sometimes they won't sell their shit to ANYONE. So, I will pirate the local soap-opera that'll never get a DVD release because it's 200 episodes long, or the 90s TV show only available through iTunes - which won't sell to my country - until they give me the means to buy them.

***IF YOU OWN A CYBERLOCKER AND ARE LOOKING TO SHUT DOWN, PLEASE EMAIL INFO@TORMOVIES.ORG SO WE CAN ARRANGE A TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP INSTEAD OF YOU ABANDONING YOUR USERS***

I think that any website which is changing it's stance to protect itself should suffer for their actions. They are turning their back on the movement and on the internet by empowering the people who went after Megaupload to think that their actions were successful in scaring people.

The actions of the media industries is nothing short of terroristic, and it's our job to stand up against this kind of internet terrorism and not be afraid and stand up and say that we are not going to submit to their threats and illegal actions.

Filesonic (and now these other companies) probably just gave them the empowerment to go after more cyberlockers and this time I put the blame on not only the industries but on Filesonic (et all) for enabling them.

A "fat sum" isn't completely necessary if you simply provide them a copy of your website. You don't even have to give them the domain name, people will find it if it moves.

Now if you are just referring to its "perceived value" based on traffic and brand quality, then you are silly because the traffic is primarily there for the file sharing. Also, you could filter out the branded parts and require them to sign an agreement not to use the brand if you are so concerned about trying to make more money off it through more legal channels.

Now I completely agree with you on the jail point. While I think it is cowardly to some extent, it wouldn't be right to say that you are wrong not to run. I wouldn't ask someone to commit a crime for me and this is no exception. After all, I cannot be sure that I wouldn't do the same thing since it would have a strong affect on the lives of my family.

Don't start this discussion. The world is divided in freeloaders and normal people. They think they are "better" then the "stupid people" who pay. In this days, you are "better" just by knowing which internet adress gives you free stuff.